Manslaughter charges were officially dismissed Thursday against two former Torrance police officers charged in the 2018 shooting death of Christopher Deandre Mitchell, a car theft suspect who was holding an air rifle at the time he was killed.<\/p>\n
Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman announced his intention to drop the case, which was filed by his predecessor late last year. <\/a>But Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta delayed a decision on the motion to dismiss due to a number of technical issues over the past six months, before finally ending the case against Matthew Concannon and Anthony Chavez on Thursday morning. <\/p>\n Concannon and Chavez were indicted in 2023<\/a> for killing Mitchell, 23, in 2018. Mitchell was sitting in his car in a supermarket with an air rifle between his knees at the time he was killed. While Mitchell never pointed the weapon at either officer, Concannon told authorities he saw Mitchell reaching for what he believed was a real gun when he opened fire, according to court records. <\/p>\n The case spanned three district attorney\u2019s office administrations. Then-Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey initially cleared the officers of wrongdoing, but Dist. Atty. George Gasc\u00f3n reopened the case and assigned a special prosecutor to review her decision. A grand jury indicted both men in 2023. <\/p>\n Both officers were investigated amid a racist text-messaging scandal within the Torrance Police Department<\/a> in 2021, where more than a dozen officers were found to have shared a litany of texts replete with antisemitic and homophobic slurs, promises of violence against Black suspects and jokes about use of excessive force. Concanon was ultimately found not to have sent any racist texts. Chavez did send several messages, according to the district attorney\u2019s office\u2019s motion to dismiss the charges.<\/p>\n Mitchell was Black, and activists have suggested the texts prove racial animus played a role in the case. In one string of messages, officers used the N-word to describe Mitchell\u2019s relatives<\/a> and joked about what would happen after Concannon and Chavez\u2019s names were made public. <\/p>\n \u201cGun cleaning party at my house when they release my name??\u201d Chavez asked, according to the dismissal motion.<\/p>\n \u201cYes absolutely let\u2019s all just post in your yard with lawn chairs in a [firing] squad,\u201d another replied, according to a district attorney\u2019s office report on the text messages made public during a separate court proceeding in 2022.<\/p>\n The dismissal played out before a half-full courtroom, with Mitchell\u2019s mother flanked by organizers from Black Lives Matter L.A. and other police accountability activists. In the back row sat several supporters of Concannon and Chavez, including a Torrance police officer in full uniform. <\/p>\n \u201cPlease stop protecting them when they\u2019re doing wrong. Because when you do that, it breaks the trust of the people,\u201d Mitchell\u2019s mother, Sherilyn Haines, pleaded to Ohta before he ruled. \u201cThey\u2019re going to keep on killing our kids with the same \u2018We feared for our life\u2019 speech.\u201d<\/p>\n When Ohta finished reading his 34-page ruling, several protesters chanted Mitchell\u2019s name and yelled at Concannon, calling him a \u201cmurderer.\u201d Chavez did not attend the hearing. <\/p>\n Mitchell\u2019s family was awarded $7.8 million to settle a wrongful death suit in 2022, shortly after a judge granted their discovery request for records tied to the \u201ctext message scandal\u201d dating back to 2016. <\/p>\n The family\u2019s civil attorney, Peter Carr, questioned the rationale behind Hochman\u2019s move to dismiss, arguing prosecutors had been \u201cshifting justification for a pre-determined conclusion\u201d across multiple filings. He noted their initial motion to dismiss argued Ohta had disallowed critical evidence in the case. Ohta later said the district attorney\u2019s description was inaccurate.<\/p>\n In granting the motion, however, Ohta said he found no objective evidence that the district attorney\u2019s office was dismissing the case in bad faith.<\/p>\n \u201cI am profoundly pleased that this nightmare is finally over for my client,\u201d said Chavez\u2019s attorney, Tom Yu. \u201cPolice officers all over this country must make split-second decisions every day and unfortunately, some decisions include the use of deadly force.\u201d <\/p>\n Yu said he believed the shooting was \u201ccompletely justified.\u201d<\/p>\n The officers\u2019 attorneys have long argued Gasc\u00f3n overstepped his bounds in reopening the case and that the independent prosecutor he hired, Lawrence Middleton, had made several missteps in filing charges. <\/p>\n A report generated last year by a special prosecutor Hochman hired to review cases Gasc\u00f3n reopened found that Middleton failed to present relevant exculpatory evidence to grand jurors and improperly instructed the panel on the elements of the crime of voluntary manslaughter.<\/p>\n Middleton, who was fired by Hochman shortly after his 2024 election, was present in court but declined to comment.<\/p>\n Hochman has faced criticism for his handling of police use-of-force cases,<\/a> with some questioning his decisions to offer lenient plea deals and dismiss charges against several officers. Last month, however, Hochman charged a California Highway Patrol Officer with murder<\/a> after he caused an on-duty crash that contributed to multiple deaths. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Manslaughter charges were officially dismissed Thursday against two former Torrance police officers charged in the 2018 shooting death…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[10479,24168,1436,10772,38513,6848,7359,48,52,51,47,50,49,38511,25825,8830,6826,117761,2322,38512,6355],"class_list":{"0":"post-271193","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-atty","9":"tag-black-man","10":"tag-case","11":"tag-charge","12":"tag-chavez","13":"tag-decision","14":"tag-district-attorney","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-la-headlines","17":"tag-la-news","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","20":"tag-los-angeles-news","21":"tag-matthew-concannon","22":"tag-mitchell","23":"tag-motion","24":"tag-nathan-hochman","25":"tag-office-administration","26":"tag-officer","27":"tag-ohta","28":"tag-text"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}